Leading With Radical Candor - Part 2
This is part two of my article on leading with Radical Candor. If you missed part one, you can find it here.
1:1s With Reports
The 1:1 with your direct report represents a great opportunity to listen, coach, and help your reports. Post-Covid, it is usually the only forum to provide “real time” feedback. A weekly 30-minute meeting works best in my experience. As a manager, this is the one meeting I do not skip. When I have a hard-conflict coming my way, I reschedule for another time that week right away.
The book touches on important concepts. First, the 1:1 is a time for your report. Let him come with the agenda and avoid hijacking the meeting by dumping feedback or focusing on new asks. I find 5/20/5 split a good balance. Socialize for five minutes (care personally). Listen actively to your report for twenty minutes. Use the remaining five minutes for feedback and items on your mind.
The quality of your guidance will depend on your understanding of the situation. Kim S. stresses the importance to stay connected with the work of your team member:
If you get too far away from the work your team is doing, you won’t understand their ideas well enough to help them clarify, to participate in debates, to know which decisions to push them to make, to teach them to be more persuasive.
In my opinion, this is crucial to provide guidance and help with the issues your report is bringing up to you. A manager who simply listens and cannot contribute adds little value. That’s why you want to invest time in doing stuff. In practical terms, it means reading specs and proposals, attending key meetings with your teams (proposal review, program updates), asking for a project update, being active in collaboration channels like Slack.
Sometimes, you may observe a gap between what people are doing, what they think they ought to be doing, and what they want to be doing. Course correcting early is critical. Kim S. suggests asking questions to help your report think more clearly and develop self-awareness:
What are you working on that you don’t want to work on? Do you not want to work on it because you aren’t interested or because you think it’s not important? What can you do to stop working on it?
What are you not working on that you do want to work on? Why are you not working on it? What can you do to start working on it?
For team conflicts or misalignment, Kim suggests the following questions:
How do you feel about the priorities of the teams you’re dependent on?
What are they working on that seems unimportant or even counterproductive?
What are they not doing that you wish they would do?
Have you talked to these other teams directly about your concerns? If not, why not?
Note that the goal here is to encourage your team members to raise the issue directly with each other, not to solve the problem for them. Kim is adamant about preventing “backstabbing” in 1:1 and encouraging individuals to talk to each other.
The 1:1 is an ideal setting to practice “Care Personally”. One rookie mistake consists of jumping right into the agenda of the day. Spend a few minutes socializing, asking about the weekend, family, and what’s going on in your report’s life. Sometimes I spend ten minutes discussing non-work-related stuff with my direct reports. I do not look at my watch when doing it. This is time well spent, IMHO.
Active listening is critical, and being there for your report when they need it can make a huge difference. Kim S. suggests asking open questions such as “How can I help?” “What can I do or stop doing that would make this easier?” “What wakes you up at night?”
As a leader, it is your role to encourage new ideas and help nurture them. The 1:1 can help achieve this goal. Kim recommends the following questions:
“What do you need to develop that idea further so that it’s ready to discuss with the broader team? How can I help?”
“I think you’re on to something, but it’s still not clear to me. Can you try explaining it again?” “Let’s wrestle some more with it, OK?”
“I understand what you mean, but I don’t think ‘so-and-so will. How can you explain it so it will be easier for them to understand?”
“Is the problem really that they are too stupid to understand, or is it that you are not explaining it clearly enough?”
There is an important caveat to avoid. You do not want to become the contributor and own the idea. Brainstorming with your report is okay, but there is a fine line between discussing options and giving a personal judgment. I have strong opinions and personally struggle with that one. When I get it wrong, I simply call it out during the 1:1 and tell my report this is just one opinion among others and that it is his job to form his own opinion.
Staff Meetings
After the 1:1 with your direct report, your team meeting is the most important meeting as a manager. In term of frequency, Kim S. suggests every two or three weeks. Weekly is not justified IMHO, there’s not enough happening and important updates can be shared async or in 1:1s.
As a a manager, you are responsible for making the best use of your team members’ precious time. It falls on your shoulder to have a good agenda prepared in advance and someone who help run through the agenda items in a timely fashion -you, a team member or project manager.
What makes for an effective staff meeting? Kim S. mentions three goals:
Reviews how things have gone since the last staff meeting
Allow people to share important updates
Force the team to clarify the most important decisions and debates for the coming week.
I like the simplicity of her approach. If you have a large team, have each group leader speak on behalf of the team. Important updates need to be carefully selected and added to the agenda.
The staff meeting is not the place to have a debate, nor is it the place to distribute good and bad points. Limit your pass-downs to an allocated time slot. Coach your team members to present the facts and next steps, and ask for help if needed. It is a common pitfall to waste everyone’s time on issues that only concern a small number of people. Step in as needed.
The book has a section called “Signs you’re failing as a boss” and lists three important reasons:
If people just give you updates that could simply be emailed to you, encourage them to use the time more constructively
Good news only. If you hear only good news, it’s a sign people don’t feel comfortable coming to you with their problems, or they think you won’t or can’t help. In these cases, you need to ask explicitly for the bad news. Don’t let the issue drop till you hear some
No criticism.
Often, what is not said is more important than what people feel comfortable sharing with you. I agree that you should be worried about things going too well. One reason could be that you did not establish a trust circle that allows individuals to speak freely without fear of being judged or perceived negatively, e.g., the “you raised a problem, now go and fix it” attitude.
I recommend using caution before challenging the team during a staff meeting. First, if you are wrong and everything is going smoothly, you may achieve the opposite effect and damage trust. Second, you do not challenge someone publicly without private knowledge of the situation. Perhaps you heard from peers or another team member that a project was challenging. In this case, it is good practice to simply bring it up by saying, “How is project X going? Any concerns about meeting our goals/deadlines?”. There's no need to be mysterious about it.
On the other hand, your team may raise too many issues, some real, others perceived. It can be due to a lack of guidance on what represents an issue or a “protect my…” strategy. Kim S. recommends the following:
Prioritize issues. Once things get flowing, remind people that often far more issues will get raised than will get fixed. The goal is to make things better—making them perfect is unrealistic. Push the people in the room to decide what the most important issues are and prioritize those.
Identifying real issues is the first step towards resolution. Next, your team needs to work on resolution.
Decision-driven Culture
Making decision is an important part of a Product Manager daily job that it deserves its own section. Radical Candor devotes a full chapter on the topic.
As discussed earlier, it is your job to help your team identify real issues that need a resolution. Don’t jump straight to decision making. Kim S. says:
You’re asking them to make decisions before they’ve had time to think things through. When do they get to just talk, brainstorm with you?
Kim S. mentions A Primer On Decision Making where James March explains why it’s a bad thing when the most senior people in a hierarchy are always the deciders:
What he calls “garbage can decision-making” occurs when the people who happen to be around the table are the deciders rather than the people with the best information.
So true yet very hard to apply. As a boss, we feel responsible for the outcome and often come to the table with a preconceived idea of who is right and wrong. It takes strong listening skills and trust in your people to let them come up with the decision.
Kim S. suggests a three step process that anyone can put in practice:
The team identifies a “serious issue” that needs follow-up
Debate the issue with key stakeholders in an open forum; do no make any decision
Schedule a “Big decision”. Name a “decider” (not you). Key stakeholders for the meeting need to be identified in the staff meeting earlier. Keep an open door policy for guests to join
Kim S. summarizes the decision-making process with this:
BIG DECISION” MEETINGS Push decisions into the facts, pull facts into the decisions, and keep egos at bay
Remember: you are not the decision maker (90% of the time). You need to be supportive of the decision even if you don’t like it. You may use veto power once or twice but do it too often and the team will lose trust in the system.
Kim S. suggest that if you really care about the decision, you announce you have veto power. I disagree with her approach. If you truly trust your team, you articulate your POV with supportive facts and ask your team to take those into account. If politics comes into play, I’d rather have my team come up with the best solution and warn them that we will have to play the political game. Of course, challenging your team’s conclusions on facts is fair game.
Breaking team’s trust is a barrier not to cross. That’s why laying out the rules of the decision-making game and sticking to it is so important. That quote from the book summarizes best (emphasis added):
CULTURE EATS STRATEGY for lunch.” A team’s culture has an enormous impact on its results, and a leader’s personality has a huge impact on a team’s culture. Who you are as a human being impacts your team’s culture enormously.
Even the best teams do not always get the right outcome and fail to deliver at times. Kim S. has this recommendation:
When you’re the boss and shit happens, it’s your responsibility to learn from it and make a change. If you don’t, you create a culture that doesn’t learn from its mistakes.
Career Discussions
Career discussions play a critical role on the long-term performance and happiness of your reports at work. Kim S. comes with an original suggestion to engage in new career discussions:
Life story conversations: practicing these conversations helps to remind everyone that they have a goal: learning what motivates people at work.
She is referring to understanding the life story of your report from the beginning. Then:
The second conversation: dreams The second conversation moves from understanding what motivates people to understanding the person’s dreams—what they want to achieve at the apex of their career, how they imagine life at its best to feel.
I have never tried this approach, at least not going as deep as engaging for an hour or more on a life discussion. The dreams conversation is a tricky one. You really need to build trust to have this conversation with your report otherwise he will be worried about “saying something wrong” that will negatively impact his career prospects.
There are softer ways to approach this. For instance, in my career discussions with directs, I make it clear that there are many paths to success and it does not have to be limited to our team if they find better better opportunities in the organization. I encourage them to tell me about the type of work they like.
What truly motivates you? Fully owning a project? Executing on a well defined strategy?
Are you more of a visionary and strategic leader? Or a team builder and guide?
How important is it for you to get promoted? Are you happy where you are?
Kim S. warns about creating personal development plans that focus too narrowly on the things a person has to do to get a promotion. Maybe they don’t want the next promotion, but the way the conversation is structured makes them reluctant to say so. Instead, Kim S. recommends to ask:
What do you want the pinnacle of your career to look like?” Because most people don’t really know what they want to do when they “grow up,” Russ suggests encouraging people to come up with three to five different dreams for the future.
Then, she suggest doing a skill gap assessment for the future position. As you review each skill with your report, I recommend to ask your report to asses his competency level for each skill. You do the same and share notes the day of the conversation. YOu should leave the meeting with a pretty good idea of skills needed to develop for the next growth stage.
Finally, the book recommend a third conversation to help reports think about their future dreams and get inspired:
What do I need to learn in order to move in the direction of my dreams? How should I prioritize the things I need to learn? Whom can I learn from?” How can I change my role to Learn it?
Courageous Leaders
Early in my career, I managed a team of six software engineers in a startup. It was a young, dynamic, and fun team. As the company acquired big customers, we were challenged to deliver enterprise quality. One of our junior developer struggled to adapt to change. His work was not on-par with our expectations. I had shared this feedback with him multiple times in 1:1s and in career check-ins. Eventually I decided to let him go after consulting with my manager. It was a nerve racking decision being just twenty six years old. Yet, it was the right one for the business. To my knowledge, my peers had never laid off an engineer. It was not easy to be the first one going that route. To my surprise, many engineering leaders thanked me later for doing this.
The topic of letting under-performers go is usually taboo and not often talked about in leadership articles. Radical Candor brings a refreshing perspective with clear guidelines that I adhere to.
Kim S. summarizes it as follows (emphasis added):
WHEN SOMEBODY IS performing poorly and, having received clear communication about the nature of the problem, is showing no signs of improvement, you must fire that person.
Part of your job as a boss is to acknowledge and deal with emotional responses, not to dismiss or avoid them.
Clearly, letting someone go is the last step in a long process. As a manager, it is your responsibility to communicate early and often to under-performers and use frameworks like SBI to share feedback. Each situation is unique and I am strong believer that everyone deserves a second chance. When confronted with under-performers and peer pressure to act, you want to have your management principles well established and not fold after the first push back from your boss.
Once you reached the conclusion it is time to let an individual go, in alignment with your boss and HR, it is important to recognize this is not the person’s fault and that many factors are at play. Kim says:
There’s a lid for every pot.” Just because the person is not good at the job they do for you doesn’t mean there isn’t another job out there they could be great at.
The whole process is emotionally taxing. However, this is your job as a manager to deal with it. If this is your first time going through it, my advice is to keep your personal emotions on the side. Remember that, as a manager, you seek the best for your people. This is true in good and bad times. As your report goes through this painful process, remember you are probably his best and only ally. Act that way and keep his best interest in mind until the end. Remember the “Care Personally”?
Well Rounded All Year Round
Becoming a great manager and people leader is not as simple as applying frameworks and advice from great books such as Radical Candor. Things can get bumpy or play differently than expected. You may have to adapt. Personal and family life can also take a toll on you. At times, you may get overwhelmed or distracted by things at home. Your team members will recognize changes in behaviors, especially negative ones. You will not always be at hundred percent. Kim S. frames it as follows:
Guidance is hard, and there will always be pressure on you not to be Radically Candid. You can’t “fix” yourself once and for all; you have to manage yourself, daily.
Jame Clear, an expert in habit formation and personal productivity, writes a weekly newsletter called 3-2-1 Thursday that I highly recommend. Besides the weekly wisdom delivered to you, James does a great job reminding us of our flaws and accepting them. He rightly calls out the need to focus on the present, what you control, and work every day to get closer to your goals. His philosophy reminds us to stay focused all year round and accept our own imperfections.
So how do you stay well rounded all year round?
Self-awareness is key. Identify your down periods. Be present in the moment and recognize when your guidance and candor is sub-par. Don’t fret about it. Try to correct the behavior right away. If you said something you regret, apologize to your team member, restate what you meant to say and move on.
Being well rounded all year round requires deep listening skills and intellectual honesty. You may leverage your subject matter expertise in an area to guide your crew. However, the environment and facts may change. Imagine a team member coming with an innovative idea to invest in a new field. He argues the market conditions have changed and this justify a pivot. You may have a bias against the proposal, especially one that has no exec support yet. Your guidance may be tainted. Or perhaps you are just a “status quo” guide who does not fare wall with unconventional ideas.
John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist, said:
When the facts change, I change my mind.
Keynes’s approach can help you change your opinions or strategies when presented with new information or evidence:
Empirical Evidence: Keynes believed in basing conclusions on observed data. If new data emerges that contradicts previous beliefs, one should be ready to adapt rather than cling to outdated ideas.
Flexibility: Being ideologically rigid can be a detriment. The world changes, and our models and strategies should be malleable enough to change with it.
Intellectual Honesty: To acknowledge that one's previous stance might have been incorrect requires humility and intellectual honesty. Instead of defending an outdated position, it's more productive to adapt to the new reality.
Pragmatism over Ideology: Keynes was known for his pragmatic approach. He wasn't wedded to a single economic ideology. Instead, he believed in applying solutions that worked, even if it meant contradicting his earlier positions.
Some pragmatism and a willingness to modify your views based on new facts will help you be a well rounded guide all year round.
Conclusion
If becoming a manger or excelling at this job is important to you, do yourself a favor, go and read Radical Candor. You will get timeless advice you can apply everyday in your manager’s job.
The book is written for American-style managers and borrows managerial processes from the Tech Industry (1:1, staff meeting, career plan). If you work in a different industry or in a country with a strong culture (e.g. Japan), those advice may not work or represent best managerial practices. Use your own judgement.